Transformation is an evolution. All organizations and people are constantly evolving in their journey. As people grow older, they get wiser and hopefully you can say the same for your organization as it matures.
The concept of digital transformation can be scary for organizations that have well-established processes or may not consider themselves tech-focused. But digital transformation is for everyone, Fearless meets organizations at every level to help them transform.
This is how Fearless defines and talks about digital transformation:
The way people interact with products and services has changed, and new capabilities offer modularity, security, and accessibility.
The delivery of government services should match the digital and modern era we are in.
Digital Transformation is the adoption of new habits and operating models optimized for services and technologies of the digital era.
It’s not only transforming outdated or incomplete technology, but also transforming culture, adding space for experimentation and failure, and building collaboration to break down silos inside the organization.
Digital transformation should not be scary
In digital transformation, everyone is on a unique part of the transformation spectrum, and that’s more than okay. Transformation means different things for different organizations.
For example, there are organizations who are still sitting on large-scale mainframes and digital transformation for them could mean moving away from mainframes and exploring the Cloud. Then there are other organizations who are looking at Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality when thinking about digital transformation.
Success is an organization’s progress, not how they compare to another company’s digital transformation.
The USDS Digital Services Playbook is a great starting point for building effective digital services. Fearless builds on those plays to work with customers to identify the best tools, practices, and migration strategies to holistically transform their organizations.
By aligning the entire organization around a transformation strategy while modernizing and simplifying outdated tools and processes, we support better performance and collaboration.
Digital transformation is about culture as much as technology
Tech is easy. Culture is hard. We need to rethink many of the behaviors we form over years.
Our Air Force client, BESPIN, is a good example of how digital transformation can reshape organizational culture.
BESPIN (Business and Enterprise Systems Product Innovation) was created in 2018 by Air Force BES to specifically drive digital and mobile transformation within BES. The software factory strives to deliver exceptional custom mobile experiences for all Airmen that improve quality of life, mission success, and safety.
To reach this goal, BESPIN needed to improve technology capabilities and upskill the Airmen’s technology capacity. The first step of digital transformation within BESPIN was breaking through traditional barrier of the military rank. Innovation happens at every level of rank but good ideas may not have previously floated up to the top in a rank-focused environment. The Air Force’s software factories have implemented rankless teams, placing importance on ideas and innovation no matter the rank of the person making the suggestion.
The best ideas don’t always come from the top, and everyone in your organization should feel comfortable expressing themselves and contributing to the conversation.
Digital transformation enables you to better serve your users
Agile and digital transformation go hand in hand. The Agile Manifesto prioritizes individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Even with the best intentions, we’ve seen process and habit creep in and interfere with organizations building the best products for users.
We worked with BEPSIN to change the process for creating new products. Teams began meeting directly with users during the discovery process, instead of meeting with proxies who tried to communicate the needs of users. Tweaking the way discovery was done, allowed the BESPIN team to develop a better flightline application for crew chiefs.
Chiefs are out in the field but they don’t have always have a tablet with them or adequate internet access to document maintenance needs on the flightline. This forces users to take paper notes on the flightline and then manually input the information on desktop computers. This is a slow process, prone to errors and labor intensive.
The BRICE application now provides live, real-time information updates to crew chiefs on the flightline with the goals of improving documentation capabilities and data accuracy, increasing flightline efficiency, and offering a better user experience than traditional legacy systems.
Digital transformation supports security teams
Let us preface this by saying that security is really important. Security teams prevent hacking and ensure secure information is not stolen.
But security can be challenging when creating an agile culture.
We promise digital transformation is a friend of security and will help security teams.
The continuous feedback loops in Agile means a product goes out to the user as soon as possible to gather feedback. This feedback loop is critical in creating software. Frequent feedback allows us to make corrections efficiently and develop a product that works for the user.
Traditionally, security teams want to do an assessment that could take months before a product is approved for release. A long development cycle that includes a months-long assessment before a product gets to the users means a lot of time and money could be spent before finding out a product doesn’t work for the user.
We help security teams learn how to approach their work through a transformation lens. The more frequently we look at coding, the more secure we actually will be. We can catch errors early and fix the isolated problem versus waiting until the end and having to start all over again.
